I absolutely love this processor!!! I have found I can easily overclock my particular part to 4.35GHz all core with 1.385V. However, on my Crosshair VII Hero I think I am a bit limited in that respect.

That being said I have found that the reviews are generally correct. The best options for this processor are to leave almost everything except your memory at stock. Your memory and the Infinity Fabric you will want to tune manually or using the XMP/DOCP profile. I also turned on Precision Boost Overdrive and AutoOC and am getting better performance than with an actual overclock. There is a problem with the AMD provided Ryzen Balanced Power Plan as it is installed, however, there is a developer that has brought this up to AMD and released a power plan of his own that resolves ... More

I absolutely love this processor!!! I have found I can easily overclock my particular part to 4.35GHz all core with 1.385V. However, on my Crosshair VII Hero I think I am a bit limited in that respect.

That being said I have found that the reviews are generally correct. The best options for this processor are to leave almost everything except your memory at stock. Your memory and the Infinity Fabric you will want to tune manually or using the XMP/DOCP profile. I also turned on Precision Boost Overdrive and AutoOC and am getting better performance than with an actual overclock. There is a problem with the AMD provided Ryzen Balanced Power Plan as it is installed, however, there is a developer that has brought this up to AMD and released a power plan of his own that resolves this issue, improves performance and improves the thermals.

Speaking of thermals, that is something to take into consideration. If you are going to be pushing this processor to its limits on a regular basis, such as live streaming with x264 or video encoding this thing will produce a lot more heat than the provided Wraith Prism can really handle and you will likely see thermal throttling occur if you choose to use that included cooler. I'm running an Asus ROG Ryujin 360 and see temps stay around 78ºC-79ºC with the highest spike being 83.6ºC during a long video encode in Handbrake. You will need a strong cooler.

Also, as is true with the previous generations, this processor is very sensitive to RAM speed. I have G.Skill Trident Z Neo 3600 CL16 that seems to be a bad kit as Windows is only seeing it as being 2133MHz CL15 regardless of what a manually configure. That issue is separate however, and I bring it up to point out that I have seen people reporting scores in Cinebench R20 upwards of 5000 points. My scores with these problems with my RAM are in the 4500. I bring up the issue with the ram to illustrate just how sensitive these processors are to RAM speeds.

All in all though I love this processor. I stream to Twitch at 1080p30 medium and I absolutely love it. This processor handles that quality with ease.

I have not had any major issues with this processor at all. If you want a good all around proc that doesn't completely break the bank, this is the proc to get. Less